A Closer Look:

Front	Back
Ultimate	Connections

    Sapphire sent this out in a brown box, so I was limited on the information that came with it. Included items consist of the DVI to VGA adapter, RCA adapter and RCA extension cable for TV out, RGB for HDTV adapter, and 1 S-Video cable, plus a drivers CD.

   The Sapphire Ultimate X1600 Pro uses a bluish-green printer circuit board, but what really grabbed my attention was the word "ULTIMATE" on the sticker that was on the card. Hmm... what makes this card Ultimate compared to the the other X1600 Pros on the market? The GPU core is 500Mhz... The RAM is 800Mhz... Seems to be just like all the other X1600's out there. So what's the difference?

Included Items	RGB Cable
RCA Video adapter/cable	DVI to VGA

   So far, the only difference I have noticed on this card compared to some others I have seen/reviewed is the big heat pipe cooler attached to it. I mean, this card weighs a ton, and the heat sink is massive on BOTH sides of the card. The way it's designed on the front side of the video card, the heat sink over the GPU and RAM is a solid chunk aluminum about 1/4 thick.

   On top of that is another piece of aluminum that is oval shaped with fins cut into it. The solid section of the oval heat sink is S shaped. (A nice touch added by Sapphire.) In between the two chucks of metal are two heat pipes that wrap around the top of the card and head on over to the back side of the card. Guess what? That heat sink is huge, too.

   This heat sink is also in two pieces and the heat pipes are sandwiched in between. This heat sink on the back is finned and has a recess for the fan that sits inside it. The circuit for the fan has a variable resistor that determines the speed depending on how hot the card is.

Finned oval heatsink	Grooves for Heat Pipes	Heat pipes on lower Heatsink
Lower heatsink on GPU	Recessed Fan	Back of the back heatsink

    Under the heat sink lies the GPU: the ATI RV530 PRO. This GPU is found on the X1600 series of cards, and features 12 pixel pipelines, a 500Mhz Core Clock, and has a power consumption of 40W. The X1600 cards also have H.264 support, and, as an added bonus, this card is CrossFire Ready. CrossFire Ready cards require an identical CrossFire Ready card or a CrossFire Edition card in order for the CrossFire feature to work, plus a CrossFire capable motherboard.

    The RAM used are Hynix HY5PS561621AFP-25 IC's. These GDDR2 memory modules are rated at 800MHz. Being that they are already clocked at this frequency, it will be interesting to see how much over clocking headroom they can take. The card features 256MB of this memory onboard. And now, it's time to benchmark the card.

Ram

Hynix RAM